I got tired of typing my name in mdm - so I installed lightdm, no apparent problems. It asked which one I wanted to use as a default. I think, Ok, looking good, right! (right?) I said lightdm.

Now, I boot, and i get errors, and mint won't boot. Won't boot in recovery, either. Startup says mdm is not default, and it is shutting it down, something about a pipe and can't write, and stopping systemV compatability. Same thing each time, but I had to boot into windows to write this. I can't boot mint no way. Not regular, not recovery. Same messages both ways.

What do I do now? I don't particularly want to reinstall from scratch - lot of work, that.

Last edited by Hiero2 on Sun Jan 06, 2013 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Boot up mint and when it fails hit ctl/alt/f1 Hopefully this will put you into a virtual terminal where you can login and run that command. If you can't reach a virtual terminal like that you will have to use a chroot environment from a live cd which isn't quite so easy - start googling!

Thanks, viking! Ctrl-alt-F1 worked. Yup - I thought about doing the chroot bit last night - but fortunately I don't have to do all the drive mounting and all.

However, something in the lightdm install was borked - the dpkg-reconfigure did not work. So, I used dpkg-reconfigure to reset it to mdm, and I'm back in business. I'll have to review the installation of lightdm when I get some time!

I faced a similar issue in my laptop which runs Linux Mint KDE and had to revert to KDM. I too used ctl/alt/f1 though recovery worked for me.Seems like a video driver issue as commented in the post....